Kelley, (sorry this is late, been busy)
"You say you aren't speaking from theory, but you are."
I tried to outline a huge topic quickly with heavy use of metaphor and rhetoric. But the bottom line was descriptive, not theoretical--theoretical only in the Kantian sense of ideas derived from experience. But I don't want to go into a philosophical nuance. Let's do that in another context.
Your persistence at this norm business and Nathan's reminders, did convince me, if you notice. I started out remembering the spontaneous cohesion of solidarity, and then changed my mind. Also Alec Ramsdals description of bebob, the improvisation helped to filled out more, and reminded me that there is foolishness involved--pabulum noodling. So, I changed over to this idea of a dialectic.
If you consider that solidarity can have different forms, a managed, controlled form, and at least this other unmanageable spontaneous form, then hopefully you can imagine a dialectic and a shifting or melting one into another with several variations in between.
But let's go back to the old stolid, managed form, run by leaders and experts. This sets up an opposition with the intellectuals high above and the masses down on the ground. How do you break out of what I see as antithetical to a more concrete form of solidarity? It is easy. You trade skills: I teach you this, you teach me that. I mean there must be primers on this in the old dusty organization books, moldering in somebody's basement.
Remember that Sally Field's movie about unionizing a textile mill in the South? I forget the title. When she was trying to get other women in the mill involved, she was learning how to organize. The union rep lived in a trailer. Sally came home from work, fixed dinner, argued with her husband, dealt with the kids and then drug herself over to the union guy's place.
If you want to get beyond this model of expert and trainee, professional and amateur (a class division), you have to change tactics. But it is more than just tactics or strategy, it is a commitment to a different world.
Forget the movie now. Assume she is single. Here is how it should work. The organizer shows up at her house in the morning (behaves himself or herself sexually), buys the damned groceries, does the housework, takes care of the kids after school, so that when Sally gets home from the mill, they can work on common ground--the business at hand. He supports her work, she supports his. See?
What I am trying to get at is you have to serve in the trenches. You have to give over to the community, so that you can call on the community. This isn't a moral issue. It is a practical matter or a practical theory. In order to teach what solidarity is, you have to demonstrate it in concrete terms that are immediately grasp. It is a collectivization of skills, as if skills were 'property'. In other words, join each other's skills together. Give solidarity and get solidarity back. It sounds childish, but it works. (It also has its own traps, but that is a different problem). It works a lot better than what I am doing right now, which is just a lecture.
So, instead of leading and chastising, you build directly, in common, trading what you have to give first, so that it will come back around later. You don't work toward a collective, you immediately create it by joining it in advance, by making it the basis of relationships within a community.
I should try and relate all this to something economic, since this is supposed to be an economics list. Unfortunately I don't know shit about economics (that's why I am here), so I'l try and relate it to work, the workplace. But another time.
In any case, it should be obvious that the form I just outlined, has an explicit economic parallel in collectivization of property, collectivization of skills, work management by committee and so forth. It doesn't have to be living in cinder block mass housing, commuting by rail to work in long lines, all dressed in black. That was some militarized, police state version--ironically, the very epitome of hierarchy--a grim farce of collectivization.
Remember the ad series in the Eighties, "Ees, svim vear, ees, evening vear", says a fashion announcer dressed in a Russian army outfit? Well, that ain't it.
Gotta go.
Chuck Grimes